"E.A. Draffan" writes:
> I wonder if it depends on the age of the book as the one I tried "Sea-side
> Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, & Jersey By George Henry
> Lewes" was not accessible on-line using Adobe text to speech or a screen
> reader.  It was just a picture of text so said it was blank. .

	It has more to do with the origin of the text.  Scanning
a piece of paper is easy so, of course, that's the kind of PDF's
one seems to find everywhere.  It is a lazy and confusing
practice that also wastes bandwidth in that a scanned image
takes up about ten times the storage space as a document
containing text in one form or other.

	Some books come in a PDF file containing both the image
and a textual version of all the print so that it can be
searched for key words which is a winner for everybody, and many
books these days start life as a word processor document which
can easily be converted to PDF and will contain retrievable text.

	So, yes, newer books are more likely to be readable via
screen readers if they are converted from their native word
processor files, but if they are simply scanned paper versions
of text such as what Google Books is doing, they are nothing but
paper without the paper.  You still have to do an OCR process on
the video to even hope to get anything to read.  Just hope that
it was straight in the scanner and there weren't too many thumb
prints and fly specks on the paper when they shot the pictures.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group